I meant to say something about this the other day – on Saturday night when I was meant to be getting ready to meet Paul and Jaim over at Hampstead, I suffered what can *only* be described as the negative effects of a sock emergency.
Typically I wear Explorer Socks (described on the website as “The 4WD of socks”. Not sure how they arrive at that conclusion, but anyway…). Now as anyone who's ever bought explorer socks can tell you, they're normally available in 2 sizes – one for people with big feet, and one for people with Stupidly big feet. I customarily take the latter. One day however I decided that I'd bet against my normal policy of buying red and yellow socks only, and was tempted by blue. It's a sort of royal blue – certainly not your drab navy blue… sort of the colour of freshly squeezed Smurf. The problem was that thought they had this great colour of sock, the sock was only available in the smaller size. Cleverly I elect to throw convention to the wind, and figure that just because it says “up to size 10” there's no reason it won't fit a size 12 foot!
As it turned out, they fit quite well. It's just getting them on and off that are a bit of a challenge.
The problem arose in that I'd spent my Saturday lugging furniture, boxes, and 44 gallon drums full of black hole matter (a slight exaggeration, I'm sure) up and down stairs. Ergo, my muscles were all a bit fatigued, and particularly my hands and finger muscles – they were doing that thing whereby you can't grab on to things properly as the muscle is too overworked to properly provide the strength to push one side against the other in the manner traditionally described as “gripping” something.
I'm sure the more astute of you will have figured this out by now – yes, thrillseekers, I was made 15 minutes late for dinner because I couldn't get my socks off.
Several helpful folk have suggested that if such a situation is to ever rear its ugly head again, I should try simply getting in the shower with my socks on, and the water would cause them to expand enough to easily slip off. Customarily this is a property of woollen clothing (and also the reason why sheep don't swim), however in the case of the 4WD of socks, I don't know that it'd be effective. And where does that leave me, eh ? Standing in the shower with my socks on! That's where!
As luck would have it, I was finally able to remove the blue socks, have a shower, and put on a more sensibly sized pair… although I do confess, they didn't quite have the striking visual appeal of the bright blue ones.